Benjamin "Ogle" Tayloe (May 21, 1796 — February 25, 1868) was an American businessman, bon vivant, diplomat, scion of colonial tidewater gentry, and influential political activist in Washington, D.C. during the first half of the 19th century. Although he never held elective office, he was a prominent Whig and influential in presidential electoral politics in the 1840s and 1850s. His home, the Tayloe House, became a salon for politically powerful people in the federal government and socially influential individuals in the United States and abroad. Tayloe was also a party in the important 1869 contract law case, Willard v. Tayloe, 75 U.S. 557. Birth, schooling and diplomatic career Tayloe was born on May 21, 1796, at Ogle Hall in Annapolis, Maryland, a home belonging to his maternal grandfather, Benjamin Ogle, the ninth governor of Maryland. His maternal great-grandfather was former provincial governor Samuel Ogle, descended from an ancient Northern English Family, the Barons Ogle, a family allied with the Manners of Rutland, Cavendish's of Newcastle, and even earlier Baron de Ros. Tayloe's father was Colonel John Tayloe III, one of the richest people in Virginia. Colonel Tayloe had built The Octagon House in 1800, and his great-grandfather. John Tayloe II, had built the great country estate house of Mount Airy in Richmond County, Virginia, in 1762 on an estate his father, John Tayloe I inherited from his father William Tayloe (the nephew) previously known as "Tayloe's Quarter." In addition, he counted as his progenitors' such men of the tidewater gentry at Col. Thomas Addison of Oxon Hill Manor, and Benjamin Tasker Sr. He was tutored by Samuel Hoar, a prominent lawyer and politician in the state of Massachusetts. When he was 13 years old, he entered Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. His roommate was John Adams Dix, later the United States Secretary of the Treasury, a U.S. senator, and 24th governor of New York. He entered Harvard College in 1811, where his classmates included some of the most prominent Americans of the next half-century: historian Jared Sparks; jurist Theophilus Parsons; cleric and politician John G. Palfrey; Unitarian minister Convers Francis; businessman John Amory Lowell; and historian William H. Prescott. He was a member of the Porcellian Club. While in college during the War of 1812, he witnessed the famous battle between and . He dined with Chesapeakes captain, James Lawrence, the night before the battle. He graduated from